And what a long, strange trip it's been.

I love rust blue and well-finished walnut as much as anyone, but be warned...this is a "working rifle" built on a modern Mauser action, and not one of the works of art that gets posted to NE pretty regularly.

This Empire Rifles takedown was acquired in December 2009 with a 24-inch barrel in .30-'06 and a 26-inch barrel in 6.5-'06. Each barrel had a banded front sight but no rear sights since the rifle had been ordered with the optional peep sight that mounts on the rear bridge dovetail. George Sandmann was selling it for the original owner, who was apparently feeling the effects of the economic downturn. Unfortunate for him, but I was able to buy the rifle at a substantial discount.

If the second barrel was in 6.5x55 I probably would have left the rig alone, but the 6.5-'06 never turned me on. When I bought the rifle I asked George about getting a 9.3x62 barrel assembly built & he didn't seem all that eager to do it “due to the backlog of orders" he had to work through (we'd find out later that wasn't the full story).

In April 2010 I sent the 6.5-'06 assembly to Empire. I'll spare everyone the full story, but by February 2011 I had pestered George enough that he agreed to get to work as soon as I sent him a 50% deposit and the action/stock assembly. In May or June of 2011 it was clear that Empire was in serious trouble, and I couldn't get return calls or emails. I ended up calling the local police chief and got my rifle returned, at my expense, and lost the deposit I put down.

I took some detailed measurements of the 6.5-'06 barrel and figured out that it was beefy enough to be a candidate for re-boring to 9.3x62. In August of 2011 my local gunsmith sent everything to Danny Pedersen (Classic Barrel Works) and by January 2012 we had it all back and ready for the other "stuff" I wanted done. Length was cut back to 20-inches and a banded Masterpiece front sight was mounted with a gold sourdough on top. Warne QD rings and a rib were fitted so I could use a 2.5x scout scope for hog hunting (I use a Leupold 3.5-10x40 in Empire QD rings with the .30-'06 and I have another set of the same rings that I'll probably mount a fixed 4x in for use with the 9.3).

Cutting foam to house everything neatly in the Storm case is on my "to-do" list but I haven't figured out which tools will get the job done to my satisfaction so that may take awhile to get done.

In practice I really doubt that I'm done acquiring rifles, but in theory I think I could hunt anything & everything I'll ever run into with this 2-barrel set!